kgeiger writes: Researchers at Taiwan's Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica are measuring emotional reactions caught in facial expressions to determine whether a game will be addictive. From TFA:

It’s difficult to evaluate an online game’s addictiveness prior to the release, says [Researcher Seng-Wei] Chen. The gaming industry’s approach is simply based on designers’ intuition and experience and the feedback from focus groups, the latter of which could be limited and biased.

Chen’s team, composed of researchers at the institute and at the electrical engineering department of National Taiwan University, aims to help game publishers avoid risky or blind investments. Using archival game data and dozens of electromyography (EMG) experiments, they constructed a forecasting model that predicts a game’s ability to retain active players for a long time.